With the declaration of “Digital India” concept by prime minister Narendra Modi, India has yet to cover a long mile in the world of modern medicine precisely in field of dentistry.

The multispeciality field of “Modern Dentistry” is no more limited to taking radiographs, extracting tooth, RCT’s, making dentures in fact a robust phase of development is seen by this field in recent years in form of cutting edge technologies like use of digitalized CAD-CAM , CBCT and advanced treatment protocols etc.

Developed countries like Japan, has been using the CAD-CAM technology since a decade. The use of an instrument for taking optical impression for designing and developing of teeth or crown for a tooth has come just 4-5 years back. Moreover, the role of a technician has changed drastically who makes artificial teeth; with the use of CAD-CAM he can complete the process with extreme precision in a very short period of time. Patients in Japan could easily afford the cost of the dental treatment based on CAD -CAM and hence this technique is already being used widely in Japan. (as said by Baba- President of Prosthodontic Society of Japan)

Rapid changes could be seen in the use of materials for making artificial prosthetic teeth. Certainly CAD-CAM crowns are comparatively much cheaper than crowns made up of Ceramic or Glass ceramic in earlier days, similarly Zirconium has replaced the two materials mentioned before. It is much easier to drill into the material and hence dental implanting has become easier and patient friendly .

A new technology now a days gaining prime concern to use is Cone beam Computed Tomography i.e CBCT technique indicated to be used in the field of clinical dentistry.

Moreover the use of CBCT is now a days a prime concern for clinicians to get the 3D image quality of bone which is not achievable by conventional radiographs. And therefore demand of CBCT is increasing in dental market .

CBCT could be used in Endodontics to differentiate any pathosis from normal tissue , in management of aberrant anatomy like external and internal resorption defects, root perforation diagnosis, analyzing fractured instrument locations, canal findings, detection of apical periodontitis and surgical planning to name a few also in field of Oral Implantology CBCT plays a pivotal role in treatment protocol as in it yields as high 3D imaging of bone quality needed before planning an implant placement.

So in today’s era availability of these highly advanced and sophisticated technologies for Indian Dental fraternity is a must to achieve a holistic Oral Health goal .

On the contrary patient friendly technologies would lessen the longer patient appointments benefiting them and giving precise results to the clinicians enabling them to provide client satisfaction and better results.

A must said, “With invent of newer technologies complexity in Clinical Dentistry is getting more on the contrary it imparts ease to manual dexterity hereby adding a new feather in the caps of clinicians with arrival of new technologies.”

By: Dr. Shivam Sharma